Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Commanding your text editor

blog.peepcode.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 66 posts

Re: Commanding your text editor

#31

Post by goldfeld »

The other day I was thinking about how Sublime Text's Ctrl+P's great usability could be extended to more use cases, and I began wondering,

1. Why doesn't it already index on the function names (the ones you get to by pressing @), so that I could find a file not by it's name or path, but by it's function definition (and with less priority, by it's function use)?

2. Why doesn't find in files work with the same usability, even if the match would not be as instant? Having an overhead box and the file auto open in the buffer as it matched would be a great improvement over what seems like a set in stone standard of opening a new dialog/file to display the find in files results.

If anyone knows of settings, plugins or even other editors I can get for these features, I'd be in heaven.

Re: Commanding your text editor

#32

Post by kayoone »

johncoltrane wrote: post #30
kayoone wrote: post #22

As long as my programmer idols Carmack and Persson use Visual Studio and Eclipse respectively to produce amazing stuff, i dont really care about changing to vim/emacs...besides i work mostly in statically typed languages anyway, so i would miss alot of the IDE features for refactoring.

Just spent half of the day doing AS3 in Eclipse. That was nice… thanks to the Vrapper plugin. Once you go Vim, using any other editor is a nightmare. Maybe that's just me but I would be incapable of choosing an editor/IDE/smartphone/perfume/car/whatever because someone I admire uses it. That sounds incredibly childish to me.

> Maybe that's just me but I would be incapable of choosing an editor/IDE/smartphone/perfume/car/whatever because someone I admire uses it. That sounds incredibly childish to me.

That is not what i was trying to say. I mean that when reading HN with all its Vim/Emacs hype one could get the impressions that you cant be an awesome software developer without using vim/emacs. But some examples like mine might help to check with reality.

Lots of what you read on HN is hype, be it vim/emacs, textmate, NoSQL, or some form of super cool javascript framework that is currently fashionable. Its good to know that there are still lots of devs in the real world, using proven tools and being as productive/awesome as the people using the latest buzz.

Re: Commanding your text editor

#33

Post by johncoltrane »

kayoone wrote: post #32
johncoltrane wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just spent half of the day doing AS3 in Eclipse. That was nice… thanks to the Vrapper plugin. Once you go Vim, using any other editor is a nightmare. Maybe that's just me but I would be incapable of choosing an editor/IDE/smartphone/perfume/car/whatever because someone I admire uses it. That sounds incredibly childish to me.

> Maybe that's just me but I would be incapable of choosing an editor/IDE/smartphone/perfume/car/whatever because someone I admire uses it. That sounds incredibly childish to me. That is not what i was trying to say. I mean that when reading HN with all its Vim/Emacs hype one could get the impressions that you cant be an awesome software developer without using vim/emacs. But some examples like mine might help to che…

Thanks, this explanation makes more sense than your original comment.

I agree with you on everything. These days, the number of new Vim users who switched because of some misinformed and/or shiny blog post is staggering. People now seem to just jump from one ORM or VCS or editor or framework or DB or design pattern or language to another twice a week. I wonder what would happen if nobody was there to tell them what to do?

Being a good dev is totally independent on the tools: everything that matters is in the head.

I like Vim because it shortens the path from brain to code quite dramatically. But it's definetely not a pre-requisite for being a good dev (which I don't pretend to be, BTW).

Re: Commanding your text editor

#34

Post by [deleted] »

kayoone wrote: post #32
johncoltrane wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just spent half of the day doing AS3 in Eclipse. That was nice… thanks to the Vrapper plugin. Once you go Vim, using any other editor is a nightmare. Maybe that's just me but I would be incapable of choosing an editor/IDE/smartphone/perfume/car/whatever because someone I admire uses it. That sounds incredibly childish to me.

> Maybe that's just me but I would be incapable of choosing an editor/IDE/smartphone/perfume/car/whatever because someone I admire uses it. That sounds incredibly childish to me. That is not what i was trying to say. I mean that when reading HN with all its Vim/Emacs hype one could get the impressions that you cant be an awesome software developer without using vim/emacs. But some examples like mine might help to che…

[deleted]

Re: Commanding your text editor

#35

Post by sejje »

kayoone wrote: post #32
johncoltrane wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just spent half of the day doing AS3 in Eclipse. That was nice… thanks to the Vrapper plugin. Once you go Vim, using any other editor is a nightmare. Maybe that's just me but I would be incapable of choosing an editor/IDE/smartphone/perfume/car/whatever because someone I admire uses it. That sounds incredibly childish to me.

> Maybe that's just me but I would be incapable of choosing an editor/IDE/smartphone/perfume/car/whatever because someone I admire uses it. That sounds incredibly childish to me. That is not what i was trying to say. I mean that when reading HN with all its Vim/Emacs hype one could get the impressions that you cant be an awesome software developer without using vim/emacs. But some examples like mine might help to che…

Vim doesn't make me feel like John Carmack.

It just keeps me sane. It just saves me from "arrow, arrow, arrow, arrow, arrow, backspace, backspace, backspace, backspace, backspace."

Editing python it's fine. If I was going to write c++, I'm sure I'd pick up an ide. With a plugin for vim keybindings.

Re: Commanding your text editor

#37

Post by scrumper »

Good article, I feel rather foolish for not knowing the delete whole words stuff; I have the feeling it's going to be a big step up in productivity for me.

There's project-wide fuzzy opening in Xcode too: bind "Open Quickly" to whatever you like (I use cmd+O). It has the same fuzzy searching as Sublime Text (for example, gvcm will take you straight to your GridViewController) but builds on it can take you straight to symbols if you want.

Re: Commanding your text editor

#38

Post by Destroyer661 »

petepete wrote: post #2

A nice introduction, although I'd be surprised if anyone who wasn't totally new to development didn't know these already. Also, 'Fuzzy file' searching in vim: https://github.com/kien/ctrlp.vim

Came here to hopefully post or see ctrlp fuzzy search for vim. When I didn't see it recommended I was shocked. It completely changed the way I interact with my files while I develop.

Re: Commanding your text editor

#39

Post by Derbasti »

yen223 wrote: post #24
kayoone wrote: post #22

As long as my programmer idols Carmack and Persson use Visual Studio and Eclipse respectively to produce amazing stuff, i dont really care about changing to vim/emacs...besides i work mostly in statically typed languages anyway, so i would miss alot of the IDE features for refactoring.

Not enough credit is given to Visual Studio's Autocomplete feature. It seriously is unmatched, and to me is one of the reasons why C# is very pleasant to work with.

Except when you're not coding C#. Then it ranges from somewhat usable to utter lunacy.

Re: Commanding your text editor

#40

Post by tikhonj »

eitland wrote: post #3

Regarding the point about autocompletion: If autocompletion is needed don't use vim or emacs, -use Netbeans or eclipse, both excellent, free (both ways) and open source. vim is great and I use it all the time but not for Java and PHP where the IDE support is so good that it really makes a difference.

For most languages (however, notably not Java), Emacs can have great auto-completion. I personally really like auto-complete mode. It might take a little bit of effort to configure auto-complete mode to work very well with your favorite language, but I've found it well worth doing: it's far, far easier than learning some new editor and lets me keep using the rest of Emacs's great features in any language I happen to be using.

EDIT: Reading some other comments, there is Emacs-eclim that gives you Java IDE features inside Emacs. So forget what I said about Java: Emacs can now handle even Java well!

For dynamically typed languages, Emacs can essentially be as good as possible fairly easily. I've been using it for JavaScript and Racket lately, and it's been really great for both. For statically typed languages, there are often type-aware tools that make it as good as any IDE--for example, I've used TypeRex[1] for OCaml; there is also ENSIME[2] for Scala and similar tools for a bunch of other languages.

[1]: http://www.typerex.org/ [2]: https://github.com/aemoncannon/ensime

Just because Emacs is a great text editor does not mean it isn't a good IDE. It has some very good support for a whole bunch of languages. I'm under the impression that Java is an exception to this rule, but I really don't know--I haven't used Java in a couple of years and really hope I will never have to use it again.

So, all told, I think this oft-repeated advice to use an IDE instead of a text editor like Emacs is misguided: Emacs is much more an IDE than just a text editor. Perhaps it's accurate for Vim, which I've never used (and I wouldn't be surprised if Vim support IDE features well too), but it isn't anywhere near true for Emacs.

Post reply on HN